What happened to page rank?

PR 5 pages place higher than PR 6 now

[jhill1]

Hi,
I have to admit I have been asleep at the wheel. I have a page on my site with PR 6 but I only place 5th in the search results for a certain 2 word search phrase. 4 other sites have pages with PR 5 but they place in the top 4 slots. How can that be? I used to think PR was the definitive measure for result placement. Thanks for your feedback.

jwh

[birdstuff]

Google has pages that are PR10 but my PR6 and PR 5 pages outrank Google's PR10 pages for hundreds of keywords and phrases. They outrank Yahoo's PR9 pages too.

PageRank is just one of the factors used to determine positions in the SERPS, otherwise Google, Yahoo et al would outrank every other site on the web for every search term.

My guess is those lower PR pages that are outranking yours have either more inbound links than yours or links from higher PR pages than yours and/or more links with the keywords in the anchor text.

And of course their on-page SEO could be better than yours. In short, PR is more of a tiebreaker than anything else.

[jtbell]

Keep in mind that PR depends only on linking structure. It has nothing to do with page content or the keywords being searched for. That's why the Google Toolbar can show you a page's PR when you're simply visiting it.

Look at it this way: Apple Computer's home page has a PR10, but you wouldn't expect it to turn up in a search for "fresh oranges", would you?

[randle]

Never thought I would say this, but forget about it. The PR of your site, although important, and more is always better than less, just doesn’t have a whole lot to do with where you rank anymore. It's a result, not a cause.